Before you sign.
A vendor is pitching you AI. The demo was good. The question is not whether the technology is impressive. It is what it costs in total, what work it actually removes, and when it pays you back.
For owners and operators being sold a platform they cannot fully evaluate.
Most buyers are not equipped to pressure-test an AI purchase, and that is not a failing. The vendor has run this conversation a thousand times. You are running it once. The gap is not intelligence, it is repetition, and it is the reason good operators sign contracts that never pay back.
The true cost.
What disappears, and what appears.
Who owns quality.
Comparable evidence.
Integrations and governance.
Downside and exit.
If it cannot be explained simply,
it is not ready to be purchased.
One problem
A single expensive thing it fixes, with a measured baseline you can point at today.
One result
More revenue, less cost, or capacity returned. A number that moves, not activity that rises.
One clock
A conservative payback date built on your volumes and your margins, not a vendor benchmark.
Three plain answers. Anything needing longer is not a decision yet, it is a hope with a contract attached.
A written recommendation, and the questions to ask.
An evaluation guide built for your deal.
The questions to put to the vendor, the answer that should satisfy you, and the warning sign that should not. Written in plain language so anyone in the room can use it.
A decision scorecard.
The conditions that must all pass before a purchase is worth making, so the decision rests on evidence rather than on how convincing the demo was.
A recommendation you can act on.
Proceed, proceed narrowly with a limited pilot, or pass. Including what to buy instead when a smaller tool would do the same job for less.
Sometimes the answer is no, and that is the most valuable outcome we deliver. See Brief 1, where the evaluation ended in a decision not to buy: the platform eliminated no overhead, reduced no cost, and added no capacity.
An established owner-led business was weighing a data activation platform from a credible company with a substantial client list. Rather than evaluate the product, we built a way to evaluate any product, and handed the owners a set of questions to take into the demonstration.
Read the brief →GET THE QUESTIONS
BEFORE THE MEETING.
Send us the proposal you are weighing. We will come back with what it will really cost, what it will really change, and whether the return is there.